Sunday, 29 January 2012

So the time has come round for the announcement of the 2011 Orwellian Prize. The prize is given for an article in an English-language national newspaper that achieves an unusually high level of inaccuracy. Only articles that describe a piece of published scientific research are eligible. Points are given for every statement in the article that does not match the original source, as follows:

Factual error in the headline: 3 points

Factual error in a subtitle: 2 points

Factual error in the body of the article: 1 point

Last year, I got two nominations, but, as described here, neither adequately met the criteria. This year, I’ve had just one nomination, from Neurobonkers, but it’s set a standard for inaccuracy that will be hard to beat. The article that I first selected in 2010 to illustrate the scoring system scored 16 points. This one achieves a startling 23 points. The source article by Kucewicz et al (2011) can be found here. Here is a screenshot of the account in the Daily Mail, with errors marked in red (3 points), orange (2 points) and blue (1 point).

There is a detailed analysis of errors in this blogpost by Neurobonkers, which I urge you to look at. Suffice it to say, the academic paper is not about cannabis, smoking or schizophrenia. Rather it is about an artificial compound that is not present in cannabis, which was injected into rats, and which led to changes in their brain waves.

There were some complaints to the Press Complaints Commission, and presumably in response to this, the article was modified. The headline, which originally read Just ONE cannabis joint 'can bring on schizophrenia' as well as damaging memory was altered to Just ONE cannabis joint 'can cause psychiatric episodes similar to schizophrenia' as well as damaging memory. Perhaps even the Daily Mail found the notion of a schizophrenic rat implausible. But the rest of the article remains, as a scare story about cannabis. And here is what makes this article such a prime candidate for the Orwellian Award: this is not about a hyped press release by a university, or misunderstanding of complex science. It's not even about sensationalising a scientific finding to draw readers in. No, this is about using a scientific paper as a prop in the Daily Mail's anti-cannabis campaign. A ploy that the newspaper has previously used in another ideological battle, on climate change. When reporting research, no respect is given to the truth: scientists are simply used to bolster a preconceived opinion, and if they don't do that, their findings are distorted.

Twelve of this article's 23 points came from the headline. Journalists don’t write the headlines. They therefore dislike my scoring system because it penalises errors in headlines more than errors in the body of the text. My view is that it’s the headlines that count for most: far more people will read the headline than the text, and for many readers it's the only part of the article they will process. It’s important
that it's accurate. Although few would defend frank lying, some editors seem to think it doesn’t matter if a headline is hyperbolic, provided it sells the paper or gets someone to read further. This very issue has been a topic of debate in the recent Leveson Inquiry into culture, practice and ethics in the UK media. I feel strongly that it's a cop-out to just wash one's hands of it and blame anonymous sub-editors for misleading headlines. I shall therefore continue to award points in proportion to the prominence of the material. But I appreciate it’s not then fair to make the award to the journalist. Indeed, given the Mail's agenda on cannabis, the journalist in this case may well have been under duress to write a scare story. I will accordingly be making the award to Paul Dacre, Editor of the Daily Mail. I will be happy also to send the token of appreciation for the nomination to Neurobonkers if he/she is willing to email me to tell me where to send it.

I'm pleased not to have had more nominations this year: it suggests that, despite all the grumblings about science journalism, the field is in rude health. I've certainly read a lot of good science reportage in our national newspapers, and where articles have made me angry, it's often because of hype by a press office or scientist, rather than distortion by the press. There are, however, still a few topics, among them drugs policy, where the political stakes are high and scientific reporting is cynically exploited to support an otherwise weak argument.

Coming up with an award certificate and item turns out to be an excellent way of avoiding doing serious work.....

Monday, 23 January 2012

Last week a French documentary called “Le Mur” attracted
attention in the New York Times. Plans to screen the film later this week in Philadelphia are being
contested by three of the interviewees. They are all psychoanalysts who treat
children with autism, and they complain that the film has been unfairly edited
to make them look ridiculous. They are suing the film-maker, Sophie Robert in
her native France.
All the signs, though, suggest that their legal action is causing a Streisand effect, drawing attention to them and generating considerably more criticism of
their activities than would otherwise have been the case. A website called
“Support the Wall” has links to the documentary, with English subtitles, and to
other sites highly critical of France’s
idiosyncratic approach to autism intervention.

At nearly an hour long, the film is quite demanding to sit
through, so I thought it might be helpful to post a transcript of the
interviews with psychoanalysts, so people can judge for themselves whether the
analysts have been ridiculed.

This text should, however, be read bearing the following
points in mind:

The translation
was not done by a native English speaker, and I simply copied the text from the
subtitles, rather than attempting to improve on the translation. It is
important to realise that some apparently incoherent utterances could be due to
poor translation.

The subtitling is
very amateurish and uses multiple colours in a way that can make it difficult
to read at times. Unintelligible material is denoted as (xxx)

The speakers are
indicated in brackets, with (I) denoting the interviewer (presumably Sophie
Robert). All other speakers are psychoanalysts.

My ability to keep
track of all the analysts is imperfect, and so I may sometimes have misattributed
a statement - please refer to the original movie if you want to be certain of
who said what.

(Update, 26th Jan 2012: World Service Health Check podcast on this topic)

The Wall

Introduction

For more
than thirty years, the international scientific community has acknowledged that
autism is a neurologic disorder that is the cause of a handicap in social
interaction.
All autists have the
same anomaly in one area of the brain, the upper temporal line1 identified
in 2000 by Dr Monica Zilbovicius.
In France,
psychiatry, being very largely dominated by psychoanalysis, ignores these
discoveries. To psychoanalysis,
autism is a psychosis. In other words, a major psychic disorder resulting from
a bad maternal relationship.

1 Comment by DVB: I assume
this refers to the superior temporal sulcus. I regard the statement about
anomalies in all autists as an over-simplification

------------------------------------------------------------------

The Interviews

(Dr Alexandre Stevens) I think that autism is a mode of
reaction of the subject that is obviously very early in his logical history.

It is that (xxx) response to what comes as invasion of the
world and of the other.

He clams up.

He clams up, he gets into a bubble and refuses to enter the
mechanisms of speech.

But (xxx) some autists speak, don't they

So it is more than speech, in the subjective mechanisms

I mean, speaking, yes, but without being really involved.

(interviewer) Do you make a structural distinction between
psychosis and autism?

(AS) No, I don't.

(I) Are autists psychotic?

(AS) Yes. That is to say, autism is an extreme situation of
something that is in the scope of the set of psychoses.

*****

(Professeur Pierre Delion) The structural distinction that
one can make between autism on the one hand and child psychosis on the other
hand

that is (xxx) the aspect of the description of the
underlying structure does not stand up to analysis in the continuity of this
first structure and the second one.

It seems to me that there are paths between the autistic
structure, the psychotic structure, and the dysharmonic structure.

Now, when we say that, we upset many associations of parents
of autistic children who think that autists have nothing to do with psychotics

To me, this is a mistake; there are many things in common.

*****

(Dr Genevieve Loison) It is the crocodile! (gets out toy
crocodile)

So the crocodile tells us right away what it is all about.

They play with it and when they put the hand or an object
in, I am worried.

(demonstrates with hand in mouth of croc)

When they get on top of it and hit it, I feel reassured.
They are fighting!

(I) Why? What does it mean, the crocodile?

(GL) The crocodile is the mother's belly, the mother's teeth

(I) Is that what Lacan used to call the mother: a crocodile?

(GL)Yes, so the goal of our work is to forbid her to eat.

(I) To eat the child?

(GL) We put a stick in him

When the child starts getting out this, sometimes he puts
his hand

(demo hand in croc mouth). Sometimes he puts a figurine in.

(I) And this pen, what does it stand for?

(GL) (Puts pen across croc jaws) So this means "You
can't any more" It is the bar.

(I) Is it the father's phallus?

(GL) That's it. You can't do that any more.

(I) It is the father's law, that bars the child from his
mother and that forbids the mother to destroy the child.

(GL) Right, and to devour him.

(I) Does this also relate to autistic children?

(GL) Of course, yes. For autists it is a matter of stage,
you see.

We take the children at some stage.

The autistic children, they often put the child in there
(has what looks like a tortoise in shape of a bag?)

They go in there. Then, we get worried, right?

(Interlude with family with autistic children)

(05:15)(I) Regarding both psychosis and autism, there is an
explanation that is traditionally used is that a maternal depression during
pregnancy or the first months of the baby’s life would have altered the
mother-child relationship, and could be responsible for severe disorders.

(Prof Daniel Widlocher) So, this is what serious colleagues
tell us, so consequently I listen to them.

*****

(AS) It can be the case, when the child comes in such
conditions where the other, his first “other”, the mother is very depressed. I
mean she will be absent from him, will be in another look at him, that it could
sometimes make it so that the child chooses to withdraw.

Sometimes, when the mother is depressed, when she is
pregnant or at birth, sometimes the child can be autistic.

*****

(GL)Woah, well, we have seen a few of them. I remember, it
was when I was in a psychiatric clinic that I have seen them, mostly.

I have seen massive things, massive voids, disorders.

I have seen abandoned mothers! For each autist there was, I
would say, a different cause.

I have seen many mothers abandoned at the end of their
pregnancy.

And the child… depressive mothers too, mothers in the baby
blues afterwards, abandoned at the end of pregnancy, who have a baby blues
after delivery, who are themselves in the emptiness and who put the child in
the relational emptiness.

*****

(DW) For example, deep deficiency

For instance, a mother who, for reasons of depression does
not take any care of her child, stays mute in front of him, clotted, while the
child is there, starting to hang on to her, looking for contact.

It can, if it lasts long during childhood have consequences
on the young adult who will keep being very cold, inhibited from an affective
perspective, because, when he was a child, he unfortunately had a very cold
mother.

*****

(I) Is there a higher incidence of the cases of psychosis or
autism in countries where there is a war?

In the favelas of Rio? In
all circumstances where mothers have good reasons to be depressed?

(GL) I am not aware of that, I cannot answer.

I can only answer about what happens in my practice, you
see.

(07:55) (interlude)

(08:41)(I) How can one explain that a maternal depression
could cause a child to be autistic?

To start with in utero?

(09.04)(AS) So, first of all, in utero some things already
happen

I am not a specialist of in utero, but there are things
happening.

The child moves, mothers speak

Mothers talk to him and react to a number of stimuli

In fact, what do children know about this link to the other,
in utero?

It does not completely go through language.

But it goes through the whole environment of corporal sounds

Finally, a depressed mother, when the child is there in
utero, does the child feel anything?

I am totally unable to tell you, but I do not feel like it
is odd to think so.

*****

(Dr Aldo Naouri) Most of the time, the symptom of the child
is no more no less than the symptom that allotted to have by the maternal
unconscious mainly

Because children are in a relationship that is very very
permeable in the communication with their mother

Gestation literally conditions a child and forms him.

And really gives him something entirely produced by the
body, that comes from his mother's body.

This weakens the field.

It puts the child in a state where his resistance is altered
by the conditions that come from his environment

*****

(10:22)(Prof Bernard Golse) For the baby, there is one half
of his genes, of his chromosomes are from his mother the other half from his
father

So, there is one part that is like the mother, this one does
not pose any problem

but there is one part that is like the father and that
immediately poses a problem

As soon as the baby is conceived, the motherly organism will
immediately secrete a very strong wave of antibodies to expel the baby that is
half stranger to the mother's body

It is a little sad to say, if I can say, the first thing
that biologically, the mother cannot stand in her baby is the part that comes
from the father

So what is anthropological in there is the double
"no"

No, I do not recognise this baby; I want to eject him, and
at once a no to the no.

Which we will find later in the language

There is a whole interesting question

and in language one will find such double negations.

This comes at the biology level.

(further interlude with family)

(I) Why don't severe autistics speak?

(Prof Daniel Widlocher) I don't know

My first idea is that they do not speak because they are not
stimulated for speech.

Like children that are very little surrounded by a stream of
language often have language difficulties even though they do not have autism

Consequently there is language stimulation, a parental
stimulation of the environment that is very important

*****

(AS) We are not neurologically wired for language

Psychoanalysis does not belong here, if you want

We are not wired for language.

Of course it takes the capacity to speak but the essential
thing is that precisely language is outside of the organism

*****

(GL) Why would they communicate, they are in fusion!

They communicate without words, there is no need to acquire
speech

Speech implies access to the symbolic, access to the father.

I am not only with my mother

There exists a father who created me in the origin, who was
the founder, with his paternal might, who has created a child.

Only progressively with the child discover this.

(I) In what does the father embody the symbolic?

(GL) Ha, this is difficult

He is access to abstraction, access to the distance

Access one has to speak when one is no longer glued

He comes to interpose between the mother and the child

*****

(Prof Bernard Golse) Speaking with the other means that one
is no longer merged with the other.

As long as one is no longer separate, as long as one is
combined in the other

which is the problem for autistic children, precisely for
whom the other does not exist

but when the other starts emerging they are still in such a
pathologic distance that they can't speak with the other

*****

(I) About autistic children it is said that their mother
cannot catch their eye?

(GL)Yes, they are not at all in the relationship

they are staying in an egg

(I) They flee the mother because they are merged with the
mother?

(GL) They have not taken off at all.

They have stayed in the egg, in the uterus

Why do you want them to look or speak?

*****

(14:22)(BG) You can not think of the other one, you can not
speak with the other one unless you have some free range.

As long as you are still included, interpenetrated, merged
with the other one, you can neither think to the other one, nor speak with him

this is almost a truism

If language touches us so much all our life long, and
psychoanalysis goes through language it is that language is only about
separation.

That is a vision.... very very well.... it is a vision of
development that is extremely specific to the psychoanalytic vision of things

(interlude with family)

(I) The Psyche does not evolve independently of the brain.
It does not wander alone in the void.

If we have one side a normal child with a well-functioning
brain and on the other side an autistic child with a malfunctioning brain,
doesn't it make a fundamental difference in its capacity to communicate with
the outer world?

(Esthela Solano) This way of conceiving the causality of
autism is very reductive.

What we can notice when we take care of autistic children is
precisely that autistic children are sick of language

That autism is a way to defend themselves from language

(interlude with
family)

(voiceover) The Austrian-American psychoanalyst Bruno
Bettelheim was the precursor of the psychoanalytic treatment of autism.

Bettelheim compared autistic children with concentration
camp prisoners that were swinging back and forth, staggered by terror, waiting
for an imminent death.

Reasoning by analogy, he was convinced that autistic
children were the victims of torturer parents, freezing mothers who had desired
the death of their child.

Bettelheim's work has been largely rejected in the USA since more
than thirty years.

But how is it in France?

*****

(PD) Bruno Bettelheim is a victim of injustice of
contemporary history.

I think that he did his work at a time when no one cared for
autistic children, an absolutely exemplary pioneering work.

He got interested in autistic children because he was coming
out of an artificial deficiency experience that he had gone through in
concentration camps.

He arrived on the autistic planet thinking that finally here
are children that maybe suffered from deficiencies in a manner similar to what
I have lived myself.

I will try to treat them from this hypothesis, meaning by
separating them from their parents.

*****

(GL) There was absolutely no tie.

Mothers who have them so fear them, even during pregnancy

And after, there is absolutely no tie.

And the child is abandoned and can even wonder how he has
been conceived.

But the fact is that they were conceived.

He is totally empty, pregnancy is only organic, the child
does not exist as a person.

He is totally in the relational emptiness.

And this gives what Bruno Bettelheim, yes, of course

*****

(Yann Bogopolsky) No no, Bruno Bettelheim has said much more
than that.

This is the caricature.

I do not say this for you but for those who well

It is not only about mothers, it is also about the father's
place in the mother's desire.

And it is about a certain amount of data, not only those
with which the child is born, and the link that has been created, or the
desires of death that such mother could have had for this new born child.

But all the mothers who have desires of death for their
child, all these desires will not necessarily make their child psychotic!

(interlude)

(voiceover) At the end of the 60s, psychoanalysis is
starting to decline everywhere in the world.

But it takes a phenomenal success in France, with
the impulsion of an ambitious and charismatic psychiatrist.

For Jacques Lacan, psychotic and autistic children are
victims of the alienation by a psychogenic mother.

A woman who refuses to stop her pregnancy because she is
unable to split from a child who is a substitute for a penis that she has not
received when she was born.

*****

(YB) At the beginning, the child thinks that he is his
mother's phallus.

Namely that he is this object that would give everything,
fill his mother with joy, make her have orgasm.

*****

(I) Therefore autism is maternal fusion?

(GL) Wait, there are a lot of theories, right?

To me, I have either fusion or total abandon and emptiness.

It's one or the other. The two poles. It's not the same.

But when they are totally in emptiness

but what I deal with here at the practice, is rather fusion

For total abandons, I do not see them, they go to
institutions.

(I) Bruno Bettelheim says that autistic children are victims
of mothers that are too cold, and on the other side we have Jacques Lacan who
theorizes psychosis and autism as maternal fusion, through some sort of a
relationship that is almost incestuous between the mother and the child?

(GL)Yes, yes, absolutely

(I) So on the other side, we have a mother who is too warm?

(GL) Yes, too warm or too cold is not good.

It takes a mother, as Winnicott says, good enough.

Neither too good too warm, neither totally empty of course.

If there is nothing, no relationship, it will not give
anything good.

(I) How can you explain that two attitudes, two totally
opposed behaviours, could yield the same result?

(GL) There are different mechanisms; it is our job to put
things back in the middle.

*****

(voiceover) The English analyst paediatrician Donald
Winnicott is the author of the concept of "good enough mother",
according to which a mother who wants to do too well is toxic for her child.

He claims that motherhood would take mothers and infants
through a transitional madness stage, prototype of forthcoming psychic
disorders.

*****

(GL) (approaching with scary toy spider) Unconsciously, this
is what you are doing to me, in your legs.

*****

(voiceover) With Winnicott, we have come full circle

Motherhood is psychogenic by nature.

*****

(I) Do you agree with the idea of maternal madness?

That every woman, every mother goes through the first months
after delivery a stage of madness that can later be problematic for the infant
if it lasts?

(AS) Yes, yes ,but this name maternal madness does not
disturb me at all.

(I) You are a psychiatrist, madness is definitely something
with a negative meaning isn't it?

(AS) Not for me

*****

(Laurent Danon-Boileau) There is this idea that is usually
called the maternal madness of the first times

There is a moment when the mother is so glad to have her
brat that she is the one with the brat and there is no way anyone could
intervene

(I) Why call this madness, by the way?

(LD) Because of this idea of some sort of wholeness that
gives some kind of powerful might.

There is this idea that, starting when you have done such a
thing, you are almighty, nothing can reach you, etc etc.

*****

(GL) You know, madness, it's the first month of life

But the thing is we have all been mad, or almost

(I) Why call this thing, this capacity for the mother to
decrypt and understand her child's behaviour without language, why call this
madness?

(GL) Because if we stopped there, the child would go into
madness

Madness is precisely what you were asking about earlier
about autism; they stopped there

*****

(LD) Maternal madness, is maternal madness a major roadblock
to the emergence of language?

Said like that, of course, yes!

*****

(25:40)(AN) The mother is one the side of nature.

and from this standpoint, she is animal, if you want.

whereas the father was the one who founded culture

This is what made Claude Levi Strauss say this superb
definition when he speaks about the couple.

He says that it is the dramatic union of nature and culture.

You see, when law supports culture, claiming that there is
something fatherly, it means we are in the culture, return to nature shall not
happen.

(interlude)

(voiceover) In the course of my interviews, several psychoanalysts had
asserted that autism was the consequence of a maternal incest

*****

(AS) The maternal function consists of intervening in two
ways

On the one hand saying no to the fusion between mother and
the child

The father is the one forbids the mother

(I) He forbids sexually? Right?

(AS) Who forbids the pleasure of the mother

Namely, without ambiguity, who forbids that the child takes
pleasure exclusively with his mother

as well as the mother takes pleasure exclusively with the
child

*****

(Jacqueline Schaeffer) At the child's birth there is a
honeymoon, right?

Sometimes, it is not so much of a honeymoon, it can be
dramatic

But there is a honeymoon, there is a fusion, there is an
extraordinary

Well, at the same time, there is a huge pleasure together

The baby very quickly, well, there is what we can say

There is not sex difference but there is a big erotic
pleasure taken together

*****

(I) The fact that a mother takes care of her child like a
human being, this is not sexual

(YB) Well, yes it is!

Sexuality, in a first place, is not in the sense that all
take it, as genital sexuality

It is everything that, to Freud, because he is the one who
theorized this, will be the body's parts that will give pleasure to the child

So the child and mother bodies are there in a tight unison
and even the infant child does not know that he is not his mother's body.

He thinks they are one.

Well, he thinks - we attribute t his to him - he thinks he
is one with his mother.

(29:36)So, it is a work of separating the bodies.

And the pleasure that the child will get in his relationship
with the other, who is first his mother, will happen, one, in a clinch

And two, the pleasure will be related to the different
orifices of the body.

*****

(LD) There are psychoanalysts who, a long time ago, have
talked about something they called the lover's censorship.

This means something very simple.

It means that the mother is changing the infant and that all
of a sudden; she takes too much pleasure by touching the infant

And she feels, oh la, this is strange

It is not logical; I am not treating him like

(I) An incestuous thing?

(LD) Something a little incestuous, what's going on?

Well, she will think of the man with whom she conceived him,
in other words her lover.

And therefore, this will create a distance between herself
and the infant.

This is what we call the lover censorship.

(I) She has to have a man on her mind for her not to be in
an incestuous relationship with her child?

(LD) It's not "she has to" - one cannot avoid it!

*****

(JS) During maternal care, the mother can very well arouse
the penis of a little boy.

I mean, maternal care, and the little boys do not avoid
this!

We see many little boys who, when they get changed, when
they get washed by the mother, the little penis reacts

*****

(YB) The father is there to forbid and at the same time
protect the child.

That is, to protect the child from the incestuous desire of
the mother.

(I) Do you think that all mothers have incestuous desires
towards their child?

(YB) Oh yes, whether they are aware of it or not! Yes!

(I) Why are you so sure?

(YB) Well, first from psychoanalytic writings.

I mean, desire is not forbidden, its fulfilment is.

(I) But, that the love of a mother for her child is an
incestuous desire, this is-

(YB) Well yes, because she already has some trouble to
separate from her child.

There is a unity that gets done only if the father of the
child, or the one in charge of this who is not necessarily the genitor, does
not come and tell the mother that enjoyment has to happen between them.

Does not remind his desire to the mother, and the pleasure
that she will be able to have through the desire that ties them together.

The mother will have pleasure by caressing her child

By having him on her body all day, what else, she will have
pleasure

And, back to your previous question, this is how the body
will present and that sexuality, insofar as it is related to body pleasure, and
that is reused in language, is naturally present in the questions of
psychoanalysts.

(I) Then, why are most of the incests perpetrated by men?

*****

(AN) First we have to notice that father-daughter incest is
definitely more frequent than mother-son incest

And why are there not, or no more, mother-son incests?

For a very simple reason, which is that the motherly
attitude to children, whether they are boys or girls, is spontaneously an
attitude of incestuous essence.

Every mother's dream is that her child does not lack
anything

The motherly tendency towards the child is an incestuous
tendency

And there is no need to act. In her attitude, there is
already enough, she does not act.

*****

(JS) Paternal incest does not cause so much damage. It makes
the girls a little moronic.

But maternal incest creates psychosis. That is, madness.

There cannot be a maternal incest between a boy and his
mother without an enormous mental disorder. It is not possible.

Precisely because of this barrier.

But the daughter with the father, she did not come out of
the father, right she has not been in the father's belly

So there is something, you see. I'd say it is a secondary
incest.

Whereas the primary incest, the real one, it is the mother

It is to penetrate the mother.

And boys who penetrate their mother are psychotic.

Whereas the daughter is not.

The girls can, we have many experiences with daughters with
a paternal incest, they can manage somehow.

Now, I can't say that it works very very well

Some of them are very very bad, some a little less so

And there are those who manage by some other way

What I was saying, a little moronic. But it is very different.

(interlude)

(voiceover) To psychoanalysts, the father is guilty too.

Guilty of being absent or transparent, guilty of being
submissive to his wife.

Guilty of having been unable to intervene between the child
and the maternal ogre.

*****

(GL) He failed.

Often, do you know how many times we see fathers who would
have liked to?

and this is what we call forclusion

Forclusion of the father’s name

(I) What does it mean?

(GL) Good question!

It means that the father, in simple terms has made the child
but that he (the father) does not exist.

It is denied, his existence is denied.

(I) Does the mother deny his existence?

(GL) Denies his function, his existence. There is only her
and the child who count

The father does not exist.

Maybe he is there to bring some money in, he is here like an
extra

He does not have the function of the husband, loved,
considered in his speech

When the mother considers the father’s speech, the child
discovers speech.

(I) If the child does not speak, it is because the mother
discredits the father’s word?

(GL) Well, there are not so many here; it is mostly in
institutions; in psychiatric clinics, where I had severe autists.

*****

(ES) Fundamentally, the father’s function is symbolic.

And sometimes the real father does not carry this symbolic
function.

He can be adorable and nice, but nevertheless the child
faces a symbolic deficiency on the side of the paternal function.

*****

(36:26)(GL) Either he does not have room or he only exists
through violence, or he is violent himself.

We sometimes realise that he is violent to exist.

And that he pries doors open in a way, when no one opens
them for him!

*****

(ES) When on speaks about the paternal function it is about
something that drives you in your life.

It is like a highway, a compass.

(I) Why wouldn’t the mother, as a woman, provide the child
this basis? Even on her own?

(ES) There are some mothers who can transmit a paternal
function.

(I) But why isn’t it a maternal function? Why isn’t it a
maternal symbolic? Why give it a gender?

(ES) The law of the mother is the law of whim.

*****

(AN) In 1984, a biologist established this extraordinary
proof that placenta is from exclusive paternal origin.

So that it is under the control of genes brought by the
spermatozoon.

In other words, the placenta is what prevents the mother
from destroying her child, and a child from killing his mother.

(I) What enables the mother to feed her child?

(AN) Yes, that allows, that transfers and filters all the
food the mother brings him.

In other words, it is a regulating element between them,
this placenta it is an interposition.

I mean it feels like the father’s attitude within the
decisions he takes, this patriarchy that he sets up, this male domination,
etc., has always been the empirical search of the function that the placenta
holds.

And that lets every child come into the world without being
destroyed.

(interlude)

(voiceover) Since Bruno Bettelheim, the major psychoanalytic
principle for the treatment of autistic children consists in separate children
from their parents.

Parents are sometimes subject to pressure to undergo therapy
because they are considered the source of the problem.

Today still in France
and Belgium
a number of psychiatric institutions are places that are not accessible to
families, who are not informed of what goes on.

What does the psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children
consist in?

*****

(ES) Let’s say that when we receive an autistic child we
practice a psychoanalysis that is pure invention.

We are facing a subject who, most of the time, cannot speak.

*****

(LD) I am rather like in an observation attitude.

I mean, with an autistic child, I do very little.

What does very little mean?

That I sit my butt down close to him, and I wait for
something to happen.

And I forget, I try to forget everything.

I forget time, I forget that we are pressed by time for him
to acquire language, I forget everything.

Because I tell myself that, since I am in this kind of
weightlessness, there could well happen something that I can not foresee.

*****

(41:20)(AS) You have authors like Tustin or Magaret Mahler who explain how it
is first about winning over the child.

Here we are in a practice, but it is the same in an
institution.

Winning over the child. I do not remember which of them
describes this.

It is about stepping a little back, not in his line of
sight.

Not speaking too loud, rather following what he says than
anticipating it.

*****

(ES) No willingness of control, no educative willingness

No compelling of anything.

*****

(BG) We finally try by all means to make the autistic child
feel that another one exists who is not threatening.

*****

(ES) It is precisely about taking into account the most
insignificant details and figure out that this insignificant detail can be
interpreted with some meaning.

And bit by bit we can proceed by supposing that there is a
sign and we take it as something like the intent of a speech.

*****

(LD) Personally, if the kid does not do anything during the
session, if I drowse beside him, I don’t care.

I am used to that in my work as a psychoanalyst.

But this implies a few things.

One, it implies not getting bored when we think with our own
ideas.

Two, it implies rowing against this whole social thing that
pushes you to be pressed by time it is all very nice, but if nevertheless if
the child is still like that in ten years, it’s not on you to … etc.

All this is true; I stay in the position of a psychoanalyst,
which means having no memory, no expectation.

And starting from then, something happens.

And that is an attitude, I believe, that is a deeply
psychoanalytic attitude.

*****

(BG) When… Perhaps… Well..

I am sensitive to what you tell me that the audience should
feel that we accept to fully endorse our convictions.

*****

(LD) If you sing a little song, and that the autistic child
doesn’t feel bad with it there is something happening.

So you’re going to tell me, there is no need of a
psychoanalyst for that.

Yes, if you are not using it as an educative method.

Yes, if you that that after all I don’t care about what the
child will do with it.

It seems like he seems interested

We do that and we’ll see what happens then. Or we won’t see
then.

The fundamental point in my attitude as a psychoanalyst with
respect to these children it is to abdicate the idea of a progress.

And this is not easy, you can believe me.

My analytic ideal demands to abandon this dimension, but it
turns out that I belong to a society in which I am paid to give care.

Consequently, I am in a conflict.

But this, a situation of conflict an analyst must be able to
endure it or he takes another job!

Because this is the basis of our analytic practice.

*****

(I) What is the impact of psychoanalysis on autistic
children?

What can an autistic child reasonably expect in terms of
result?

(PD) But I can’t answer this, this is not a matter for a
psychoanalyst!

*****

(I) What can an autistic child reasonably expect from an
analytic work?

In terms of results?

(45:20)(LD) (very long pause) the pleasure of taking
interest in a soap bubble.

I can’t answer anything else.

(interlude)

(voiceover) Nevertheless, there are solutions.

they are called PECS, TEACCH,
and ABA.

These educative and behavioral methods have been set up in
the USA over thirty years ago to enable people with autism to communicate, open
up to the world.

Thanks to these tools that are appropriate to their
handicap, young autistic children make, in a few months, significant progress.

Unfortunately, psychoanalysts fiercely stand in the way of
their establishment in France.

*****

(AS) In the French speaking world the invasion of cognitive
behavior techniques is a new invasion.

Recent, but very present today.

Psychoanalysis fights against this invasion

A number of colleagues, in particular Jacques Alain Miller
have taken the lead of this struggle, this fight.

Others too in others organisations.

It is a very important fight to keep alive the dimension of
subjectivity or the singularities of each subject with respect to the
behavioral idea of managing by squares.

*****

(Eric Laurent) You know, it is for psychoanalysis to be this
device of disenchantment.

there are hopes that come from biology, it could be
marvellous to believe in them!

If one can believe that tomorrow, tomorrow we will have the
solutions!

Well, psychoanalysis, as a speech that illuminates all
beliefs tries to enable humanity to live without believing too big whims, it’s
part of our effort.

So, the dialogue with neurosciences, is not only to inform
ourselves of the results and let know that it does not alter our fundamental
practice, the orientation of our practice, it is also about trying to make
humanity live without having too big hopes in the various good news that are
published every day that are intended to keep a rate of good news in an
environment that has so little.

*****

(voiceover) In the 80’s, 100% of the French psychiatrists
and psychologists were trained in psychoanalysis.

Since the 90s this trend is declining, but they are still
near 80% today.

This situation, unique in the world, except Argentina, has
tremendous consequences in the care of the handicapped.

Thursday, 19 January 2012

So at last, your paper is written. It represents the culmination
of many years’ work. You think is an important advance for the field. You write
it up. You carefully format it for your favoured journal. You grapple with the
journal’s portal, tracking down details of recommended reviewers and then sit
back. You anticipate a delay of a few weeks before you get reviewer comments.
But, no. What’s this? A decision letter within a week: “Unfortunately we
receive many more papers than we can publish or indeed review and must make
difficult decisions on the basis of novelty and general interest as well as
technical correctness.” It’s the publishing equivalent of the grim reaper: a
reject without review.

It happens increasingly often, especially if you send work
to journals with high impact factors. I’ve been an editor and I know there are
difficult decisions to make. It can be kinder to an author to reject
immediately if you sense that the paper isn’t going to make it through the review
process. One thing you learn as an author is that there’s no point protesting
or moaning. You just try again with another journal. I’m confident our paper is
important and will get published, and there’s no reason for me to single this
journal out for complaint. But this experience has made me reflect more
generally on factors affecting publication, and I do think there are things
about the system that are problematic.

So, using this blog as my soapbox, there are two points I’d
like to make: A little one and a big one. Let’s get the little one out of the
way first. It’s simply this: if a journal commonly rejects papers without
review, then it shouldn’t be fussy about the format in which a paper is
submitted. It’s just silly for busy people to spend time getting the references
correctly punctuated, or converting their figures to a specific format, if
there’s a strong probability that their paper will be bounced. Let the
formatting issues be addressed after the first round of review.

The second point concerns the criteria of “novelty and
general interest”. My guess is that our paper was triaged on the novelty
criterion because it involved replication. We reported a study that involved measuring electrical brain responses to
sounds. We compared these responses in children with developmental language
impairments and typically-developing children. The rationale is explained in a blogpost
I wrote for the Wellcome Trust.

We’re not the first people to do this kind of research.
There have been a few previous studies, but it’s a fair summary to say the
literature is messy. I
reviewed part of it a few years back and I was shocked at how bad things
were. It was virtually impossible to draw any
general conclusions from 26 studies. Now these studies are really hard to do.
Just recruiting people is difficult and it can take months if not years to get
an adequate sample. Then there is the data analysis which is not for the
innumerate or faint-hearted. So a huge amount of time and money had gone into
these studies, but we didn’t seem to be progressing very far. The reason was
simple: you couldn’t generalise because nobody ever attempted to replicate
previous research. The studies were focussed on the same big questions, but
they differed in important ways. So if they got different results, you couldn’t
tell why.

In response to this, part of my research strategy has been
to take those studies that look the strongest and attempt to replicate them. So
when we found strikingly similar results to a study by Shafer
et al (2010) I was excited. The fact that two independent labs on different
sides of the world had obtained virtually the same result gave me confidence in
the findings. I was able to build on this result to do some novel analyses that
helped establish direction of causal influences, and felt we at last we were
getting somewhere. But my excitement was clearly not shared by the journal
editor, who no doubt felt our findings were not sufficiently novel. I wasn’t
particularly surprised by this decision, as this is the way things work. But is
the focus on novelty good for science?

The problem is that unless novel findings are replicated, we
don’t know which results are solid and reliable. We ought to know: we apply statistical methods with the sole goal of
establishing this. But in practice, statistics are seldom used appropriately.
People generate complex datasets and then explore different ways of analysing
data to find statistically significant results. In electrophysiological studies,
there are numerous alternative ways in which data can be analysed, by examining
different peaks in a waveform, different methods of identifying peaks,
different electrodes, different time windows, and so on. If you do this, it is
all too easy for “false positives” to be mistaken as genuine effects (Simmons,
Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011). And the problem is compounded by the “file
drawer problem” whereby people
don’t publish null results. Such considerations led Ioannidis
(2005) to conclude that most published research findings are false.

This is well-recognised in the field of genetics, where it
became apparent that most early studies linking genetic variants to phenotypes
were spurious (see Flint
et al). The reaction, reflected in a recent
editorial in Behavior Genetics has been to insist that authors
replicate findings of associations between genes and behaviour. So if you want
to say something novel, you have to demonstrate the effect in two independent
samples.

This is all well and good, but requiring that authors
replicate their results is unrealistic in a field where a study takes several
years to complete, or involves a rare disorder. You can, however, create an
expectation that researchers include a replication of prior work when designing
a study, and/or use existing research to generate a priori predictions about
expected effects.

It wouldn’t be good for science if journals only published
boring replications of things we already knew. Once a finding is established as
reliable, then there’s no point in repeating the study. But something that has
been demonstrated at least twice in independent samples (replicable) is far
more important to science than something that has never been shown before (novel),
because the latter is likely to be spurious. I see this as a massive challenge
for psychology and neuroscience.

In short, my view is that top journals should reverse their
priorities and treat replicability as more
important than novelty.

Unfortunately, most scientists don’t bother to attempt
replications because they know the work will be hard to publish. We will only
reverse that perception if journal editors begin to put emphasis on
replicability.

A few individuals are speaking out on this topic. I
recommend a blogpost by Brian
Knutson who argued, “Replication should be celebrated rather than
denigrated.” He suggested that we need a replicability index to complement the
H-index. If scientists were rewarded for doing studies that others can
replicate, we might see a very different rank ordering of research stars.

I leave the last word to Kent
Anderson: “Perhaps we’re measuring the wrong things … Perhaps we should
measure how many results have been replicated. Without that, we are pursuing a
cacophony of claims, not cultivating a world of harmonious truths.”

Saturday, 7 January 2012

Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies,
and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beasts
are ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is very
choosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is no
other route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals,
slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack does
not see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat,
but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice piece
of lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his services
for free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals.

Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academic
publishing follows. Academics work their butts off to get research funding,
often from government. They then do the research and write up and submit it for
publication. They run the gauntlet of picky reviewers and editors to get the
work accepted for publication. Once it is published, it appears in a journal
which is sold on to academic institutions for large profits. Post publication,
the academic often has to pay a cost equivalent to several hardback books to
get a formatted electronic copy of the article. Meanwhile, the journals justify
this by arguing they have extensive costs. But in fact, it is the academic
community that does the bulk of the work for free, acting as editors and peer
reviewers. Increasingly, they are expected also to do copy editing and graphic
design, tasks that were previously undertaken by professional journal
staff.

It has taken many years for the torpid academic community to
wake up to this ludicrous situation, but things are slowly starting to change. In
some fields, academics are starting to take things into their own hands and cut
commercial publishers out of the loop, but this still the exception rather
than the rule. A more widely adopted innovation has been Open Access
publishing. On the one hand, electronic publishing has made it possible for
journal papers to be posted online and made freely accessible. On the other,
major funders, notably NIH in the USA
and the Wellcome Trust in the UK,
have insisted that researchers whom they fund must make their published work
Open Access. Obviously, something has to give: the publishers are not going to
do their work for nothing. But the system does work, with a combination of new
journals that are Open Access from the start, and older ones agreeing to make selected
articles Open Access, in both cases for a fee. In general, the funders agree to
pay the charge.

This week, however, a story broke suggesting that the
traditional publishers are trying to fight back and force NIH to backtrack on
its Open Access policy. Things hotted up with this post from Michael Eisen
who noted that one major publisher, Elsevier, has been lobbying a NY
Congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, to persuade her to support a bill that would
limit Open Access publishing. Harvard
University gave a detailed
response to the bill, which can be found here.

I want my response to this story to go beyond just
tut-tutting and shaking my head. Academics do have some power here. We provide
the articles for Elsevier journals, and we do a lot of unpaid work reviewing
and editing for them. None of us wants to restrict our opportunities for
publishing, but these days there are a lot of outlets available. When deciding
where to submit a paper, I suspect that most academics, like me, take little
notice of who the publisher of a journal is. I focus more on whether the
journal has a good
editor, my prior experience of publication lags, and whether Open Access is
available. But as from now, I shall include publisher in the criteria I adopt,
and avoid Elsevier as far as I can. Also, if asked to review for a journal,
I’ll check if it is in the Elsevier stable, using this handy
website, and if so, I’ll explain why I’m not prepared to review. I suggest
that if you are as annoyed as I am by this story, you do likewise, and refuse
to engage with Elsevier journals.

Addendum, 10th January 2012

Some people on Twitter have asked if people should be paid
for the work they do as author/editor/reviewer. Definitely not. It would just make matters
worse, because publishers would factor in these costs and charge even more for
journals.

No, I just want a change in the model whereby publishers
make enormous and undeserved profits from academics. There are various ways
this could be done.

1. The publishers could charge less: currently if you try
and download a single journal article, you are charged around £20, even though
the production costs are minimal.

2. Retain the current model but remove commercial publishers
from the loop, with publication of research limited to learned societies,
universities, funders.

3. Retain the current model but make all journals Open
Access, with the funder or university paying a one-off publication fee.

On the whole, academics are an interesting bunch. We’re not
all that interested in money, but we are skilled and can produce things of
commercial value. It’s a golden opportunity for someone who does want to make
money to step in a make a profit. Publishers like Elsevier would have been fine
if they hadn’t been so greedy and had charged modest sums for their product.
Instead, they pushed costs as high as the market could bear, making
huge profits, while at the same time giving authors less and less.
(Copy-editors have become an endangered species). Instead of facilitating
scientific communication, they have put obstacles in the way. But part of the blame
lies with the academic community, who have been far too passive. We should have tackled this years ago before it got out of hand.

Monday, 2 January 2012

A new phenomenon has occurred in my Twitter timeline of
late. These are tweets from people I don’t follow that are labelled ‘Promoted
Tweets’. When I see one, I block the sender. At present, they are rare enough
for this to be only mildly irritating. But, as someone who remembers email in
the days before spam (well, actually, I remember the days before email, and even the days before personal computers...), I worry that things could change fast.

When discussing Twitter with fellow academics, one thing
they always ask is whether it isn’t just another tedious thing that you have to
wade through, like email. Email is currently the curse of academics everywhere:
in her New Year’s blogpost,
Athene Donald noted her resolution to delete spam emails unread first thing in
the day, and commentators on her blog clearly resonate to this, as I do. I have
been cheerfully telling people that
the wonderful thing about Twitter is that you only get messages from people you
choose to follow, and it's not at all like email. Other people can’t get at you. Well, they can, a bit, in that
they can get into your ‘mentions’ list by mentioning you, but your timeline has
always been totally under your control. But the folks at Twitter have other
plans, as explained here.

Needless to say, Twitter is a business. It’s not my
God-given right to have a free Twitter account. If I engage with the system, I
need to play by its rules. But I really am not that addicted. To me, having to
fend off people who want my time, money or attention is extremely tedious.
Twitter has been a delight precisely because it has been virtually free of such
irritants. Make Twitter more like email, and I will just leave. Really.